Frontiers of Possession: Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas

Frontiers of Possession

SPAIN AND PORTUGAL IN EUROPE AND THE AMERICAS

Tamar Herzog

Cambridge, Massachusetts

London, England    2015

Copyright © 2015 by Tamar Herzog

Maps on pages 28, 46, 147, and 180 copyright © 2015 by the President and Fellows of Harvard College

All rights reserved

Cover image: Map of Rio de Janeiro by Jacques Van de Claye, Bridgeman Art Library International

Cover design: Tim Jones

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ISBN 978-0-674-74518-6 (EPUB)

For the Kindle:

ISBN 978-0-674-74519-3 (MobiPocket)

The Library of Congress has cataloged the printed edition as follows:

Herzog, Tamar.

       Frontiers of possession : Spain and Portugal in Europe and the Americas / Tamar Herzog.

      pages    cm

   Includes bibliographical references and index.

   ISBN 978-0-674-73538-5 (alk. paper)

   1.  Spain—Foreign relations.   2.  Spain—Territorial expansion—History.   3.  Portugal—Foreign relations.   4.  Portugal—Territorial expansion—History.   5.  Spain—Colonies—America—History.   6.  Portugal—Colonies—America—History.   7.  Imperialism—History.   I.  Title.

DP84.H47   2015

946.0009'03—dc23             2014009292

Contents

INTRODUCTION

PART I

Defining Imperial Spaces: How South America Became a Contested Territory

1.  European Traditions: Bulls, Treaties, Possession, and Vassalage

2.  Europeans and Indians: Conversion, Submission, and Land Rights

PART II

Defining European Spaces: The Making of Spain and Portugal in Iberia

3.  Fighting a Hydra: 1290–1955

4.  Moving Islands in a Sea of Land: 1518–1864

Conclusion

ABBREVIATIONS

NOTES

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

Introduction

THIS BOOK ANALYZES the territorial formation of Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas. Rather than being determined by treaties or military confrontations, as historians have asserted, the shape both countries acquired in the early modern period was the end result of multiple activities by a plethora of agents who, while they went about accomplishing different tasks, also defined the territories of their communities and states. Situated on islands of occupation and surrounded by a sea of land they considered open for their expansion, farmers, nobles, clergymen, friars, missionaries, settlers, governors, municipal authorities, and military men in both the Old and the New Worlds explored, settled, and used different spaces. They vocally and often violently rejected claims by neighbors who wanted to do the same, arguing that they had a preferential right. Resembling a cacophony rather than a dialogue, these exchanges sometimes involved agents who were perhaps authorized to speak for their community or king—as was the case with governors, town councils, and military commanders—but they mostly called for the participation of many others who were not. Conducted in multiple sites by different actors, on various occasions, and for different ends, territorial confrontations were mostly unplanned and uncontrolled. They occurred spontaneously when the situation so required—when the various interested parties wanted to travel, collect fruits, built huts, let their animals pasture, or convert and control the local population—yet their persistence and change over time ended up restructuring both territories and rights. In Europe, these debates confronting neighbors lasted for centuries, acquiring the topography of shifting sands that appeared immutable yet in reality constantly metamorphosed while discussants, their objects of desire, and their arguments profoundly mutated. They featured ancient rights and entitlements that were compared and contrasted to evolving social, political, cultural, and economic conditions whose meaning slowly transformed as a result of changes in contemporary understandings regarding how land could be acquired and maintained. In the Americas, debates as to who could do what, where it could be done, and thus how communal terrain would be defined were shorter, yet they took a dramatic turn because the territory was huge and most contemporaries assumed it harbored great promises. Also in the New World, territorial conflicts involved the presence of indigenous peoples and thus required a constant effort to integrate (or eliminate) individuals and groups whom the Spaniards and the Portuguese considered were part of a horizon that could, indeed must, become their own.

Historians studying territorial conflicts in the past have tended to define them as disputes over boundaries. Resorting to a series of opposites, they distinguished between borders according to whether they were linear (defined by a line) or zonal (including an amorphous area), internal (vis-à-vis domestic yet nonsubjected peoples and territories) or external (vis-à-vis foreign powers), natural (as dependent on natural accidents, or as emerging naturally over time) or artificial (imposed from the outside). Linking the appearance of modern boundaries with the consolidation of states, they suggested that preoccupation with defining political spaces came from above, as kings, who were previously concerned mainly with personal subjugation, sought to territorialize their control.¹ These processes, transpiring after local communities had expanded to hinterlands that were considered empty and had undergone processes of territorialization, took shape as monarchs contracted with one another and negotiated with local authorities who could resist these developments, collaborate with them, or even initiate and encourage them. As a consequence of these exchanges between a center and a periphery that were sometimes at odds but sometimes collaborated, local communities were nationalized.² Thereafter, a territory made of a multiplicity of communities and different jurisdictions (military, fiscal, customs administration, sanitary, ecclesiastical, and so forth) came to be constructed as a single, national space that could give birth to present-day structures. The peace of Westphalia (1648) authorized these developments by recognizing the existence of a system of states, each with its own territorial sovereignty.

These narratives, mainly focused on the genealogy of states and nations, rarely asked which were the precise mechanisms and processes that countless individuals and groups embraced to establish territorial claims for themselves, their communities, and their monarchs. Neither were they interested in understanding what was involved in carving out territory in the early modern period or how rights to land were constructed, negotiated, and remembered by both locals and outsiders. Insisting that several types of distinct jurisdictions existed, most authors studied them separately, often ignoring the ways by which they dynamically interacted. Also underanalyzed was the question of how, in the process of claim making, identities changed not only on the level of states (and nations) but also on the local scene, where individuals defined themselves (or were classified by others) as members or nonmembers. It was as if the question of how claims were actually made and defended and how they were understood was nonimportant because it was sufficient to argue either that disagreement among locals invited the intervention of states or that states embraced possession as the basis for defending their rights. In these narratives, local communities were often presented as timeless and ahistorical entities, while states were portrayed as active promoters of change. Law, when it was introduced at all, had the caricature presence of something that diplomats and statesmen sometimes used but that even they did not take seriously. How contemporaries understood possession and what it led them to do was barely ever discussed. The neglect to examine the link between private actors on the one hand and the formation of territorial divisions on the other was particularly odd given that natural law discussants, so abundant all over Europe at that time, were contemporaneously obsessed with precisely this question, namely, how communal and private property were formed over time as a result of agreements and disagreements among individuals and groups. Was not their obsession telling? Were they not reproducing at least partially what they observed was unfolding around them?

If historians of Europe insisted on straightforward genealogies that linked present to past and gave primacy to royal actions on the one hand, economic interests that led local actors to pursue certain goals on the other, colonial historians suggested instead that while European borders were natural because they gradually emerged by autochthonous processes, colonial borders were artificial because they were unilaterally imposed by colonial powers ignorant of local realities in a relatively short time span.³ Many argued that, unlike in the Old World, in the New World external frontiers vis-à-vis neighbors appeared before internal frontiers of occupation were possessed and integrated. According to these accounts, the hardest task postcolonial states faced therefore was not the need to battle neighbors from the outside but the obligation to control peoples and territories that were purportedly internal to them yet hardly formed part of their polities.

These metanarratives were largely followed by historians of Spain, Portugal, and their overseas domains. They presented the territorial formation of Spain and Portugal in Iberia as the by-product of the process by which Christian communities gradually becoming states expanded southward, eliminating the last vestiges of Muslim presence (the so-called Reconquest).⁴ Among other things, these developments allowed for the creation of a small territory that came to be identified as Portugal. The separation between it and the rest of the peninsula was defined in a series of bilateral agreements that, after a long military and political struggle in the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries, recognized the independence of Portugal and distinguished it from Castile, from which it originally descended. The Treaty of Alcañices (1297) signed by the kings of Portugal and Castile and which defined the border between the two kingdoms was an important step in this direction because, according to most scholars, it consolidated a separation that thereafter suffered no major modifications.⁵ For historians of Portugal, this narrative affirmed the individuality of that country and its right to an independent existence.⁶ For Spaniards, it was mainly a lamentable episode that was neither foretold nor mandated. But whatever role the emergence and affirmation of Portugal played in modern, often nationalistic narratives, because the border between it and Spain (Castile) was generally considered a medieval affair concluded in 1297, historians of fifteenth-, sixteenth-, seventeenth-, and eighteenth-century Iberia tended to care about territorial divisions only when they were violated (in war or by contraband) or when they were useful to the construction of transfrontier histories that allegedly demonstrated that the separation between Castilian and Portuguese territories was imposed by states at the displeasure of the local inhabitants, who preferred to ignore it. Proposing a history of the border either from above (the result of royal agency) or from below (the way local communities undermined it) but rarely joining both visions, Iberian historians thus suggested an opposition between a center and a periphery with the occasional consensus emerging when local interests so demanded. They were rarely interested in asking how the theoretical division coined in 1297 was implemented or how early modern individuals living in both Spain and Portugal and their communities understood, constructed, and defended their right to land, thus also contributing to the formation of the border.⁷ Neither did they analyze how evolving conceptions regarding the use of land changed the nature of territorial debates as well as their consequences on the ground or how memory and forgetfulness helped in these processes. The pervasiveness and persistence of conflicts between residents and villages belonging to both states along their emerging frontier were simply ignored or classified as inconsequential.

While historians of Iberia in Europe insisted on the agency of kings and the longevity of a medieval border, historians of Iberia in the Americas ascertained that the penetration of Spaniards and Portuguese into the New World was governed by a series of formal documents, most famous among them the Treaty of Tordesillas, signed in 1494. Although acknowledging that these accords (also including the Treaty of Madrid in 1750 and San Idelfonso in 1777, among others) failed to solve the question of who was authorized to take over which part (see Part I), most scholars nonetheless considered that in their aftermaths, there was a border that the parties could respect or ignore.⁸ Converting the past into a moral tale in which there were good and bad actors as well as clear entitlements, historians proceeded to adopt either the Portuguese or the Spanish stand, rarely observing the controversy as it was experienced on both sides. They implicitly suggested that the question of who had rights to which part of the Americas was clear (when it never was) or that there was an evident rule that could be adopted (which there was none). Limiting their questioning mostly to what happened in European courts or to military operations, most historians also failed to describe how the activities of individuals and groups residing in the New World contributed to the formation of territorial divides. Some mentioned expeditions that roamed the interior of the American continent, but almost none followed these through to observe how they were used by both locals and kings to argue for rights. Very few were willing to engage with the complexity of the processes that led to occupation or to examine the plethora of agents and interests that were responsible for them.⁹ And although in recent years many have ascertained that interaction with natives was an important factor in these territorial debates, most scholars nevertheless continued to distinguish between a so-called exterior frontier (vis-à-vis other Europeans) and a so-called interior frontier (vis-à-vis the native population) as if both did not coincide in the same place and time and did not affect one another.¹⁰ Considering law as mostly irrelevant because reality rather than norms directed what would happen, neither they nor their colleagues working on Iberia were willing to engage with legality in meaningful ways. The question of what territorial conflict between Spaniards and Portuguese on one side of the ocean could tell us about what simultaneously happened on the other was simply never posed.

In what follows, I ask how territorial divisions in both Iberia and the Americas came into being by studying the interactions among many actors who represented varying interests and spoke from different places. I argue that, rather than preexisting entities clashing or people who had rights defending them against voracious enemies, claim making was the most common means for appropriating and thus constructing and reconstructing communal spaces.¹¹ Bilateral treaties might have framed these conflicts, but on both sides of the ocean of equal structural importance were contemporary notions regarding how domination over land (and people) could be achieved and maintained. Armed conquests might have allowed Spaniards and Portuguese to occupy certain sites, but more dangerous than war was peace, because it allowed for gradual penetration that would be impossible in times of military confrontation. For that reason, rather than solving the territorial conflict, the union of Spain and Portugal (1580–1640) exacerbated it, because in its aftermath it was difficult, perhaps even impossible, to decide what had been achieved by whom. Historical evidence also suggests that contemporaries did not ask whether borders were linear or zonal, internal or external, artificial or natural. Instead, they mostly cared about the extension and nature of their usage rights. Depending on who was asking, when, and for what end, the space contemporaries sought to appropriate could be linear or zonal, commonly used or exclusively maintained, consist of moving islands of occupation that followed, for example, the itinerary of nomad allies or resemble corridors that allowed transiting between different sites of possession immersed in a sea of unoccupied land.¹² Expanding their territories according to where they wanted their animals to graze, where they collected fruit, cultivated the land, built a hut, explored a mine, collected taxes, or established a mission, an internal frontier of occupation (meant to take hold of the land and its inhabitants) coincided with an external frontier (against foreign neighbors). In the process, rather than being predetermined and fixed, the meaning and extension of both internal and external were constantly reelaborated. Territorial entitlements involved not only identifying action (what was done) but also classifying actors (who they were). They thus led to frequent debates as to who was Spanish and who Portuguese and (in the New World) when Indians became one or the other. As a result, the territorial definition of Spain and Portugal in both Europe and the Americas was not the consequence of their subjects expanding the sovereignty of their states or empires (as most authors have assumed) or of locals trying to associate their interests with the state (as others have sustained) but the outcome of much more multifaceted procedures that allowed actors to define themselves and at the same time make claims to the territory.¹³

In these dynamics, law mattered a great deal. Often ignored by historians who mostly sought to explain the economic or political interests that motivated disputes, the question of how communities could acquire (or loose) their entitlements was nevertheless essential to these debates because it served as a matrix allowing those who wished to collect fruits or cultivate a certain area to interpret what both they and their rivals were doing. The way juridical perceptions ruled over daily interactions was clear, for example, when coming to interpret the use of violence. Aggression, which was typical of many territorial confrontations, could express an emotional or irrational reaction that disrupted communication among neighbors. However, it was also mandated by a legal logic that suggested that silence implied consent and reaction implied opposition (see Part I). Under this guise, aggression was not necessarily a senseless (albeit natural) reaction. It was, on the contrary, performative because it transmitted a clear juridical response to what contemporaries believed were legal challenges. Paradoxically, archival documents suggest that the closer communities were and the stronger the ties linking their inhabitants, the more likely they were to engage in brutality.

If this portrait is correct, then territorial divisions in both Europe and overseas were the end result of complex processes of appropriation that were carried out by hundreds of individuals in thousands of daily interactions.¹⁴ Conflict manifested itself mostly in minute struggle rather than great wars, individual actions rather than formal treaties or diplomatic negotiations. It was expressed in acts, words, and attitudes that required interpretation that was seldom consensual but that, over time, established certain facts both on the ground and juridically. Even when kings were unaware of what their vassals were doing, could not fix their activities on maps, or believed divisions were inexistent or unclear, locals generally knew that if they roamed in certain territories they were likely to be left alone but that if they penetrated others they might (although not always) suffer repercussions. For them, the distinction between what was theirs and what was not did not depend on formal documents conserved in archives, on treaties, or even on the existence of border stones. These may have been crucial for outsider observers who did not know the territory well, but for those who did, partitions were a daily experience, a habitus of sorts. Asked to explain in 1500 where divisions between Villarinho (in Portugal) and La Tejera (in Galicia) lay, Alvaro Pires said that he had always seen Portugal in possession of that territory (porque sempre viu estar Portugal de pose).¹⁵ Pedro Rodrigues explained that his father had told him where once upon a time they were located and that thirty or thirty-five years earlier, when he took his cattle to the other side of the river, he was attacked and his animals sequestered. Joham Alvares was told that he should not cross the river, and he also saw other people obeying this rule. Gonçalo Annes was informed by other community members where the divisions were, and he experienced them personally when several of his animals crossed the river without his knowledge or consent. Joam Fernandes confessed that he was the first to labor on the other side and that the inhabitants of La Tejera immediately came and protested against his activities. During these proceedings, Castilian witnesses equally affirmed what they had heard, what they knew, and what they had experienced. They also asserted that while some of their actions were not contested, others provoked the opposition of their neighbors. Thus, although most witnesses declared that they knew nothing of a formal demarcation or a separation between Spain and Portugal, they all concurred that locally, divisions, even if contested, could be well known. Part of a reality with which fronterizos cohabited, they expected that if they limited their activities to certain terrains they were likely to be alright and that if they penetrated others they could be harassed, punished, or assaulted, their animals could be sequestered, and they could be fined or jailed. They watched others obeying these rules or they were told by their parents, relatives, and neighbors what they meant. Most testimony collected by rivals reproduced these local narratives which, on the one hand, allowed witnesses to insist they knew nothing of a border and had absolutely no proof where it could be located but, on the other, described in detail where inhabitants could graze, roam, and cultivate and where not. This was true regardless of whether their versions coincided with or contradicted those of their opponents. Because such was the case, claims made by kings to territory in both Europe and the America were only the tip of an iceberg. Below it was a far more complex story in which individual and communal action directed at obtaining possession, invoking prescription, and resorting to both memory and forgetfulness played a major role.

On most occasions, the hardest task individuals and communities faced was not to win over their adversaries but to recruit the king and his officers to their cause. In order to guarantee their success, many adopted arguments likely to carry favor with the monarch. They suggested that royal sovereignty, justice, and pride were at stake, they threatened that small conflicts could light a huge fire and degenerate into a major war, or they invoked the need to imprison smugglers or reform the territory. But whatever their excuse for involving the king was, monarchs intervened (or not) according to an equally complex set of considerations. Rulers mostly justified their response by referring to their obligation to preserve the peace (sossego or sosiego), act as judges, or protect their vassals. On occasions, they and their officers might have believed what they were told or felt committed to a certain individual or community by virtue of clientage. In the Americas, they might have considered the territory important and might have hoped it would bring them great riches. But even when they were willing to intervene, kings often hoped to impose by mere presence or expected that procrastination would lead the conflict to die of its own. They were, even in the Americas, distant figures, not particularly attentive to local developments or partial to them. They certainly had no recollection of past events nor necessarily a particular vision of what the future should be.

In order to provide a fully integrated account of what was involved in carving out territory in early modern Iberia, I consulted dozens of archives and manuscript collections on both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, in both Spain and Portugal and in their present-day successor states in Latin America.¹⁶ As I processed the information, I decided to part from the customary narrative and strategically begin my story with the New World, not the Old. Historians of Latin America traditionally have referred to Europe as the motherland and considered its history a precedent that explained how colonialism developed. Mostly interested in medieval history, they implicitly suggested that developments in Spain and Portugal ceased being relevant thereafter, either because nothing important transpired or because it no longer affected overseas developments. Meanwhile, historians of Spain and Portugal generally ignored colonialism altogether or relegated it to a marginal, even eccentric place, within European history. What would happen, I asked, if we artificially reversed the existing narratives, if we began with America in order to discern what it can teach us about Europe? If we considered that Iberia coexisted on both sides of the ocean for hundreds of years rather than assuming that one shore ceased to matter after the other came into being? After all, suggesting that medieval Iberia chronologically preceded early modern Spanish and Portuguese America is natural; arguing that Europe continued to be the source of all things and received nothing thereafter is not. Placing Europe first, I reasoned, was a convention that could not be easily sustained if we wished to observe what transpired in the Old World in the sixteenth, seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The intuitive order that placed Europe first was perhaps the logical result of the genealogical predicament of history, but it had hidden costs. It obscured our vision because it set us up to argue that Europe affected the Americas, while forgetting the inverse. It encouraged us to think about the particularities of the New World while enabling us to ignore those that characterized the Old. The motherland–offspring paradigm also produced a tendency toward comparative history that more often than not stereotyped Europe as an orderly, natural space and portrayed the colonies as chaotic, artificial, and exploitative. Although some of these conclusions might have been justified by what transpired in the New World, many of them were also built into the way historians have set up the equation. But if we reversed the narrative, perhaps we could use both sides of the ocean to reflect one another as skewed mirrors, making them both participants in a unified space that existed contemporaneously. Looking at Europe would force us to consider the effect of change over time more dramatically than in the Americas, yet the Americas would enhance the sense of urgency and immediateness. Both would equally suggest that the dynamic between crown officials and local actors was immensely complex, but they would each propose a different vision of how that transpired. As for law versus chaos, placing the Americas first would have us consider the degree to which on both sides of the Atlantic peace and violence coexisted interdependently rather than alternatively. Thus, while it sometimes sacrificed chronology, placing the Americas first had the potential of freeing us from many conventions too often taken for granted and could serve to illuminate ways in which individuals and groups in both worlds engaged with similar questions and searched for similar answers, though sometimes in intensely different ways.¹⁷

Starting with America was therefore a means to accentuate, even dramatize, the effort to think about the Old World and the New World as a single space and, distancing ourselves from existing metanarratives, consider them both as vibrant entities that coexisted rather than were chronologically arranged. Combining these concerns with attention to presentation and scale, I make the Americas not only precede Europe but also introduce many of the basic questions I seek to study. I describe my findings regarding the New World in wide brushstrokes, assembling my material thematically according to actors and arguments rather than place or chronology. Examining American conflicts, I ask why treaties failed to resolve it, interrogate the meaning of possession, and analyze the extension and consequences of the union and rupture between Spain and Portugal. Responding to the usual affirmation that treaties were important, I explain their juridical futility and sustain their complete incapacity to solve the questions at hand. Responding to the theoretical assertion that possession became the main guideline for the acquisition of overseas territories, I unpack its significance and implications by asking how contemporary actors understood it and how it affected what they said or did. Because possessing required classifying actors as members of communities, I discuss how individuals and groups came to be identified as Spanish or Portuguese and what happened during the sixty years in which both countries were subjected to the same monarch. Having examined in Chapter 1 how the Spanish and the Portuguese argued their rights to the land with one another according to their European traditions, in Chapter 2 I move on to analyze their relationships with American natives. Rather than making the frontier vis-à-vis Indians a separate affair from the territorial dispute between Spain and Portugal, I demonstrate that because religious conversion also lead to civic conversion, it influenced the territorial ascription of indigenous land and justified the massive involvement of missionaries in what was purportedly a secular political affair. I argue that the right to land could also be secured by alliance making and war. Here I assert that both violence and peace were strategies used by the Spanish and the Portuguese in order to subject the indigenous peoples and that this subjection in turn had territorial implications. Whether these developments implied that the Spanish and the Portuguese recognized the indigenous right to land is another question. Juxtaposing the theoretical debate on native right to what actually happened on the ground, I suggest that, rather than a distinction between law and its application, what transpired in the American interior was an ideologically motivated divide between an internal and an external frontier, allowing actors to apply different criteria when dealing with rival Europeans and when facing natives.

Having observed the Americas, in Part II I move to the Iberian Peninsula and ask how what we have learned about the New World can illuminate what we know of the Old. After a short introduction that examines the emergence of Portugal and the territorial questions it generated, I analyze several individual conflicts in the longue durée. I interpret them by closely observing who the parties were, what the coveted object was, and how claims were made. In Chapter 3 I describe border conflicts that included multiple parties, some across the forming border, some not, who fought over different territories for a diversity of reasons. I demonstrate that their struggle might have been affected by the border that gradually separated the kingdom of Castile and Spain from Portugal but that it was also greatly modified by changing economic practices, demographic growth, and the gradual discrediting of common pastures. In Chapter 4 I observe conflicts that involved natural changes, scientific observations, historical memory, and a constant reimagining of both present and past. I ask how private, ecclesiastical, military, and political jurisdictions supported or contradicted one another, how the uncertainty of the past led to the search for reasonable solutions, and how contemporary changes in perceptions modified what was acceptable and what had to be rejected. All these cases, I argue, exemplified the impossibility of classifying territorial conflicts as simply confronting Spaniards and Portuguese or rival kings against one another.

Mostly interested in a chronological unearthing of territorial conflicts, in this part concerned with the Iberian Peninsula I argue that the European traditions identified in the Americas also worked in Europe but that their operation was different because persevering for centuries, European territorial conflicts experienced important mutations related to both memory and forgetfulness as well as public perceptions and law. I also suggest that the American point of view is helpful in reconsidering the role of different actors and, most particularly, the way European peasants could be imagined as natives, even barbarians, who were external rather than internal to the state. If the American case is meant to serve as an introduction, the Iberian case is meant to expose even more fully the uncertainties of the past. Each actor and group, I argue, had their own reading of what transpired, and neither their contemporaries nor we can truly judge who was right and who wrong. Locals constantly referred back to a status quo that they all believed existed, but each had a different recollection of what it contained. The passing of information from one generation to the other and the constant appeal to experience, therefore, were both mechanisms for preservation and instruments for change. Under the guise of continuity, the territories controlled by the Portuguese and the Spaniards in Iberia and the definition of who their members were mutated over time. Read together, the American and Iberian parts should illuminate not only the histories of Spain and Portugal and their overseas domains, and not only the historiography on border formation, but also the question of how we write history. In the conclusion, therefore, I refer to some of these issues by observing the division of Iberian history into Spanish and Portuguese narratives, the juxtaposition of a European to a colonial history, the conventional narrative that distinguishes Anglo from Spanish colonization, the tradition of border studies, the role of law as a structure of meaning, and the (in)ability of the past to supply solutions to present-day territorial conflicts.

In what follows, I refer to Spain and Portugal, Spaniards and Portuguese, even though I am well aware that these entities and identities were in flux and they often included sites, individuals, and communities to whom we would deny these categorizations today. I do so by way of convention. Faithful to contemporary usage, rather than adopting designations such as Spanish American or Portuguese American, in most cases I utilize the same terms (Spanish and Portuguese, Spain and Portugal) to refer to individuals and entities in both the Old and the New Worlds. I also refer to the Americas generically, though it is clear to me that according to present-day terminology my study is limited to the southern part of the continent. In the narrative, I often attribute agency to municipal bodies. Although this may sound odd in English, this was the way early modern Iberian communities that were legally defined as corporations were perceived and indeed acted. I also deliberately avoid studying the case of Olivença/Olivenza, a territory that in 1801 was conquered by Spain and was never returned. Many in Portugal still resent this development, and there are plenty of associations that demand its devolution.¹⁸ Yet, from my point of view, this episode—pertaining to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries—occurred too late to be included in this study. It was also highly atypical, indeed, the only recorded case of a military conquest that had persisted despite diplomatic agreement to end it. For practical ends and in order to facilitate the reading, I use a standardized English translation of names and titles in the text but conserve the original (often chaotic) spelling in the notes. I also modernized citations in Spanish, Portuguese, French, and Italian to make them more accessible and easily understandable to readers.

PART I

Defining Imperial Spaces: How South America Became a Contested Territory

THE TERRITORIAL CONFLICT between Spain and Portugal regarding the extension of their overseas domains was as ancient as the European expansion. In 1493, shortly after Columbus returned from his first voyage, the Catholic monarchs secured two papal bulls (Inter Caetera) that entrusted them with the duty to convert Native Americans in return for certain rights in territories discovered west of a meridian passing one hundred leagues off the islands vulgarly called the Azores and Cabo Verde (two island groups in the Atlantic). Because at that time Spain’s only viable rival for maritime expansion was Portugal, the following year the monarchs signed the Treaty of Tordesillas, confirmed by the pope in 1506, in which they agreed that a different meridian (this time passing 370 leagues to the west of the Cabo Verde Islands) would separate their respective zones of influence.¹ Lands not belonging to Christians that were already discovered or that would be discovered to the east of this meridian would be Portuguese; to the west, Spanish.

Although this agreement seemed clear, in the decades and centuries following its adoption, its implementation provoked constant debate. The first time the issue was seriously tested was in the early sixteenth century, when the two monarchs disagreed as to who had the right to discover and possess the Moluccas, a group of islands in the Pacific Ocean (presently in Indonesia).² At stake was the factual question of who discovered and possessed these islands first, but the conflict also required determining (1) whether the meridian set in Tordesillas encircled the globe, thus establishing the rights of Spain and Portugal not only in the Atlantic but also in the Pacific; and (2) if this was the case, whether the Moluccas were located east or west of the meridian and were thus in Spain’s or Portugal’s sphere of expansion.³ The decision to extend the treaty to the Pacific provoked no conflict, but the question of whether these islands were east or west of the meridian proved impossible to resolve. Juridically, the parties would have to agree on how to interpret the term the Cabo Verde Islands, coined in Tordesillas. Did the signing parties intend to measure the meridian from the most central point of this archipelago (as Spain would eventually claim) or from its most westward point (as Portugal would insist)? But even if the parties could settle this point (which they did not), they still needed to identify the exact location of the Moluccas in relation to this line. This, too, was a highly debated scientific issue at a time when neither the shape nor the size of the earth, nor the location of territories, was consensual.

In 1524, experts summoned to examine these questions and give their opinion as to whether, according to Tordesillas, the Moluccas should be Spanish or Portuguese failed to agree. In the Treaty of Zaragoza (1529), the Spanish king consented to sell the Moluccas, which he insisted were his, to the Portuguese, who continued to consider them their own.⁴ Although the conflict ended in a compromise, the questions it raised remained unresolved. Both sides continued to argue that the Moluccas were theirs, and both were aware of the fact that this affirmation was important. After all, at stake was not only, not even mainly, what happened in the Pacific but what would transpire in the New World.

The question of how Tordesillas would be interpreted and implemented arose again in the 1530s, when the two courts disagreed whether the territory known as River Plate (present-day Argentina and Uruguay, perhaps even Brazil) was to be Spanish or Portuguese.⁵ This conflict, which was highly theoretical at this stage because neither Spain nor Portugal was capable of capitalizing on its claims, died on its own. Nonetheless, it was a bitter reminder that nothing was settled and nothing agreed. Hopes for a peaceful solution reemerged in 1580, when Philip II of Spain became king of Portugal. In the aftermath of this union, many believed that the conflict between the two powers was resolved automatically because the same monarch ruled both countries. This, at least, was the a posteriori Spanish version, which insisted that, because the right to land and jurisdiction were royal, as long as the two kingdoms shared the same ruler, confrontation was impossible.⁶ Whether this analysis was juridically correct or not (I will return to this point), in the eighteenth century Spaniards insisted that during the sixty years in which Spain and Portugal were united (1580–1640), the Treaty of Tordesillas was forgotten, perhaps even annulled.⁷ Some even claimed that, as a result, during that period the respective rights of Spain and Portugal could be determined only according to the Inter Caetera, the 1493 papal bulls that set a meridian, which was more favorable than Tordesillas to Spain. Others asserted instead that the territories of both countries were de jure separated but de facto indistinguishable. These claims were rejected by those who argued that during the union the Treaty of Tordesillas remained in force and Spain and Portugal remained separate. According to this last version, mainly upheld by Portuguese interlocutors, because the risk for confusion was greater during the union, it was particularly important for contemporaries to determine which territory belonged to whom.⁸ But regardless of who was right and who wrong, it is clear that the dispute reemerged as soon as the kingdom of Portugal separated from Spain (in December 1640). According to Spanish complaints, as early as 1641, Portuguese troops invaded Spanish holdings in Omaguas (present-day Peru). In the Amazon region, the seventeenth century saw Portuguese soldiers and settlers attacking Spanish missions, arguing they were established illegally on Portuguese soil. In the River Plate, Spaniards conquered the Portuguese settlement of Colonia de Sacramento (in present-day Uruguay) which, according to them, was located on Spanish ground.⁹ As in the 1520s, experts convened in 1681 and 1682 to decide whether Colonia was to the east or the west of the meridian set in Tordesillas disagreed, thus leaving the question of how to implement Tordesillas open while also encouraging both sides to attempt to gain by force what they could not gain by consensus.¹⁰ Thereafter, the heartland of South America became a battleground. Portuguese from the east, Spaniards from the west, and ecclesiastics from both sides penetrated the interior with the aim of taking hold of both territory and its resources, people included. Because over time European penetration became more intense, by the late eighteenth century the dispute expanded dramatically to include territories that are presently part of Brazil, Paraguay, Uruguay, Argentina, Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia. The Treaty of Utrecht (1715), the Treaty of Madrid (signed 1750, canceled 1761), the Treaty of Paris (1763), and the Treaty of San Idelfonso (1777) all attempted to settle these differences.¹¹ However, the issues they raised remained unsolved until the end of the colonial period, and they continued to haunt Latin American states long after their independence.

The question of which territory belonged to whom concerned European courts. It called for diplomatic negotiations and the signing of successive treaties, as well as the occasional war. Yet, while the story of courts has been studied extensively, most historians rarely asked how individuals and groups challenged one another in continuous and quotidian discussions over the extension of their land. These debates, focusing not on the rights of kings or even countries but instead directed at knowing who could take which routes and where fruits could be collected, huts constructed, mines discovered, and Indians subjugated, took place on the contested territory as contemporaries sought to accomplish certain tasks. Engaged in them were settlers, ecclesiastics, military men, governors, and natives who, confronted with the need to justify their activities, found themselves involved in affirming both who they were and what were the rights of their communities. Why they were required to engage in such conversations, when these took place, and what they said is the subject of the first part of this book, in which I argue that historians and politicians who looked to the past too often and too quickly assumed that the allegations made by early modern rivals represented the truth rather than claim making. Those favoring the Spanish stand (or wishing to benefit from it) reproduced the reports Spaniards sent to Madrid in order to convince the monarch to assist them in their quarrels, in which local actors portrayed themselves as passive observers of a continual Portuguese advance into Spanish territories.¹² Spaniards, they suggested, may have discovered many areas in the sixteenth century, but their failure to settle them allowed the Portuguese, who were better equipped and manned, to take hold of most. The Portuguese lived intrusively on the land. They deliberately ignored the commitments in the (many) treaties they had signed, and their behavior was treacherous, disloyal, and unacceptable. Since the seventeenth century, ambition had led them to appropriate vast regions in the American interior with an ultimate goal of creating a powerful empire (poderoso imperio) that would embrace the entire continent, including the rich mining districts of Peru.¹³ Wishing to imitate the glory of Spain (los portugueses siempre émulos de las glorias de España), their expansion was made possible by Spanish neglect (indolencia) and the insufficient attention Spaniards gave to territorial issues.¹⁴

These accusations, which were meant to capture royal attention rather than necessarily to represent the truth, also reflected Spanish bewilderment at Portuguese expansion, which was indeed short of spectacular. Having begun in the sixteenth and early seventeenth century with a few settlements along the Atlantic coast, the Portuguese gradually came to control (or pretend to control) a huge territory, dozens of times larger. Even if they were following their own interpretation of Tordesillas or the law, as they would often assert, how were they able to achieve what Spaniards could not? Yet, as historians justifying Portugal would remark, while the Spaniards accused the Portuguese of misbehaving, Portuguese interlocutors writing to their king presented Spain as an extremely powerful party that was likely to control soon the entire continent.¹⁵ According to them, Spaniards constructed new fortifications and missions in Portuguese territories, they controlled river navigation, and, alongside their Indian allies, they attacked Portuguese forts on Portuguese territory. Portraying Spaniards as violent intruders (intrusos), the Portuguese accused them of having astute customs (costumadas astúcias) and of displaying arrogance (soberbos). They also contended that Spanish claims to American territories were as malicious and ambitious (maliciosa ambição) as their pretension to rule Portugal. All attempts to reason with Spaniards failed because they either refused to listen or to be convinced. They gave peace treaties absurd interpretations and were violent, uncivil, and cruel. While Spaniards advanced into the interior, the Portuguese emulated crabs refusing to leave the shoreline.¹⁶

This exchange of accusations reached such a point that some Spaniards were willing to argue that the Portuguese were not only liars and traitors but also barbarians. Their lack of civility was clear in their refusal to observe the pacts they had made and to obey royal orders. Because of their behavior, they could be compared to infidels. Contravening the laws of human correspondence and ignoring Christian precepts, they conducted their affairs like the Ottoman muftis who inculcated in the renegades of our faith [the] insane resolution of turning against their origin or, even worse, they followed the teachings of Machiavelli.¹⁷ While Spanish interlocutors accused the Portuguese of infidelity, Portuguese correspondents suggested Spaniards were heretics.¹⁸ Like the Dutch, Spaniards attempted to take over territories belonging to Portugal and, also like the Dutch, they distorted known truths and their actions were both uncivil (incivil) and ambitious. They violated Christian precepts that instructed the faithful against coveting the property of another. Accusing each other of unruly behavior, both Spaniards and Portuguese presented themselves as vassals who respected the